In 2013, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq prompted media-makers to look back on that shameful time. There was some discussion of the media’s ready acceptance of the Bush administration’s fraudulent case for attacking Iraq. But no one seemed to notice that top journalists and commentators were amenable to warmongering because nearly all of them were born into the war-profiting class rather than the war-fighting class. So I wrote an article pointing that out. It was published in the print edition of Razorcake and has not appeared online before now.

In a previous post, I discussed social elitism in the media, using The Paris Review and Vanity Fair as examples. If you read that one—thank you—but wondered what the big deal was, perhaps this article will answer that question.

War and the American Elite (Razorcake # 75, August 1, 2013)

This year marks the tenth anniversary of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The war’s horrific toll is still being discovered, but here are some current totals. To date, 4,488 American troops died in Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the Department of Defense. The best estimate[i] for the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the war comes from The Lancet, the leading British medical journal. The figure is 654,965 dead. That count does not include deaths that took place after July 2006. Neither figure includes U.S. civilians or nationals of other countries who died in the conflict. Nor do they account for soldiers or civilians who were wounded or for Iraqis who were tortured in U.S. detention centers.

As for the war’s cost to the U.S. economy, two leading economists—Joseph Stiglitz (winner of the Nobel Prize) and Linda Bilmes—produced a 2008 study placing it at $3 trillion. Of course, not everyone suffered from the war. Oil companies received colossal profits when the price of their product more than tripled. Defense contractors such as Halliburton (where Dick Cheney served as chief executive officer) also achieved huge financial gains.

As the 10-year anniversary passed, corporate media took time to look back, reflect, and try out some new excuses for publishing lies to support the case for war. This past March, for instance, The WashingtonPost published a piece by Paul Farhi on whether the press failed in its prewar coverage of Iraq. You might think that is a simple question. The Bush administration and prominent media outlets claimed that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda and was involved in the 9/11 attacks. They also warned that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was on its way to acquiring more, including nuclear weapons. Of course, none of that was true.

Did the media fail? “‘Failure’ grossly oversimplifies what the media did and didn’t do before the war,” Farhi explained. “Thousands of news stories and columns published before the war described and debated the administration’s plans and statements, and not all of them were supportive.” Apparently, the news people can only be judged as failures if every story turns out to be bullshit. The propaganda ministries in history’s worst totalitarian regimes could have beaten that standard.

In further defense of his colleagues, Farhi protested that “it wasn’t impossible for skeptics of the war to connect the dots.” Shouldn’t we assess the media’s performance based on what the average person learned or didn’t learn from the news? If you already had to be a skeptic to “connect the dots,” then what chance was there for people who lacked specific knowledge of the issues—and who sought that knowledge from their news providers? The only problem with applying the word “failure” to the actions of corporate media outlets is it implies that they intended to find and tell the truth in the first place.

Journalist Greg Mitchell has reported that TheWashington Post recently asked him to write a piece assessing press coverage of the case for war. But Mitchell stated that the paper killed his article, which was critical of the media, and ran Paul Farhi’s instead. The “failures” continue.

Some writers have offered explanations for the media’s eagerness to rubber-stamp the Bush White House’s lies. These include ownership of news companies by giant corporate conglomerates and reporters’ reliance on access to government sources. Those are important parts of the story, but no one seems to have noticed that, like the Bush clan, top media-makers come from the war-profiting class rather than the war-fighting class. As such, they are exempt from the costs of war but not from its positive impact on stock values and dividends.

Our economically segregated society is to blame for that, and higher education plays an especially large role. Most leading journalists come from a small number of prestigious private colleges and universities. Those institutions are remarkable for their social-class biases. Most grant admissions preferences to rich and well-connected applicants, while systematically discriminating against working-class ones. The Shape of the River, a 1998 book by education scholars, including the former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, revealed that only 1% of white students and 12% of black students at the most selective universities were of “low socioeconomic status,” as defined by the authors. (Not that the authors were concerned about that.)

Conversely, a series of polls conducted by the Pentagon in the 1990s showed that money for college was the top reason potential recruits considered military service. Which will it be? Risk death or give up on going to college. If you went to one of the right schools for landing a top job in journalism, you could hardly be farther removed from that dilemma.

Of course, class doesn’t always predict someone’s political views, but when the social elite hold a virtual monopoly on top posts in government and media, politics gets reduced to promoting the interests of the rich. Need I point out that George W. Bush is the poster child for hereditary privilege? After graduating from prep school, Bush followed numerous ancestors by enrolling at Yale University, despite his obvious difficulties with rational thought and the English language. Bush’s presidency is best understood as a medieval royal court, where longtime family servants of the House of Bush, like Dick Cheney, bled the peasants.

Servants in corporate media joined in as well, and a look at the backgrounds of top media-makers will help us understand why. The relentless push for war by Fox News Channel is explained easily enough. That network is the fiefdom of Rupert Murdoch, who got his start as a press mogul when he inherited a group of newspapers from his father, Sir Keith Murdoch. Murdoch’s media have campaigned for pro-rich, far-right policies in every country where they set up shop, launching vicious campaigns against their political opponents or just everyday people. As you may have heard, some of Murdoch’s British reporters got caught running their own spy network, hacking into phones, including one belonging to a 13-year-old murder victim named Milly Dowler. In response to that scandal, a committee of Britain’s House of Commons issued a report in 2012 concluding that Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” Now they tell us.

Hereditary succession is common among rightists in the media. John Podhoretz is editor of Commentary magazine, a job once held by his father. Likewise, L. Brent Bozell III, a conservative commentator and pollster, is the son of L. Brent Bozell Jr., a crony of right-wing icon William F. Buckley Jr. from the days when the two were students at Yale. Bozell Jr. died in 1997, but all these other country-club philosophers supported the invasion of Iraq.

Another aristocrat of the right is prep-school and Harvard graduate William Kristol, whose father, Irving, was a famous conservative writer and editor. (Among the magazines Irving edited was Encounter, which was funded by the CIA.) During the year or so before the attack on Iraq, Kristol the Younger hyped the coming war relentlessly, offering memorable promises of easy victory. Here are just a few:

“American and alliance forces will be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators.”

“This is going to be a two-month war, not a year war.”

“Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.”

Shortly after the war started, Kristol dismissed concerns that Iraq’s deep divisions between Sunni and Shia Muslims would lead to sectarian violence. He blamed those worries on “a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni.” Someone should have told the Sunni and Shia that, because a bloody wave of religious cleansing swept Iraq after the U.S. invasion.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Kristol also smeared opponents of the war as disloyal. In that task, as in others, he was simply carrying on the family business. In 2002, he wrote:

“But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects of Bush’s foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush’s Democratic critics, they know no such thing.”

Journalist Eric Alterman noticed a striking similarity between that passage and one written by Kristol’s father. In 1952, the elder Kristol praised Senator Joseph McCarthy (R., Wis.), who lodged countless false accusations of communist spying against Americans who were far more loyal to the country than he was. Here’s Irving Kristol’s tribute to McCarthy:

“For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

War-mongering and far-right punditry are big business these days, just as they were in the 1950s. In the case of the Kristols, we see the shameful spectacle of a hereditary elite quoting its own lies across generations.

When Fareed Zakaria endorsed Bush’s invasion plan, he lent credibility to the argument for war. Zakaria was less stridently conservative than the usual parade of right-wingers on Fox News Channel. He also possessed greater cosmopolitan credentials than many other war-backers. An immigrant from India, Zakaria had edited the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs and met numerous world leaders.

In an interview with New York magazine shortly before the start of the war, Zakaria explained why he agreed with Bush. “[Iraq] is so dysfunctional, any stirring of the pot is good. America’s involvement in the region is for the good.” In other words: Oh, what the hell? Why not? Just stir the pot and see what happens. Zakaria’s words do not spring from a careful weighing of the consequences of war—for the soldiers who fight it or the civilians who become “collateral damage.” They are the words of a rich kid haphazardly deciding to place a bet at the roulette wheel. To Zakaria, Iraq was just a game, a puzzle of dysfunction that the U.S. elite might be able to solve by tossing other people’s lives and money into it.

Like George W. Bush, Fareed Zakaria inherited his place in the game. His father was a high-ranking politician and his mother was a newspaper editor. After graduating from prep school, Zakaria received degrees from Yale and Harvard. Referring to his privileged upbringing, he told New York “I grew up in this world where everything seemed possible.” “We saw the best architects, government officials, and poets all the time,” he added. “Nothing seemed out of your reach.” That was the problem. Coverage of the war debate would have been better if the media’s anointed “experts” had come from a world of limited possibilities or had experience dealing with the consequences of destructive policies.

Liberal writers and media outlets also played an enormous role in building the fraudulent case for war. In fact, Bush & Co.’s preferred means of planting false information in the public mind was The New York Times—and, specifically, reporter Judith Miller. Here is a short list of bogus claims presented as true in Times articles either written or co-written by Miller.

1. Saddam Hussein was seeking components for nuclear weapons.

2. Saddam already had an array of chemical weapons, including anthrax.

3. The Iraqi military was attempting to make a biological weapon, using smallpox.

The Bush gang’s puppeteering of Miller was so tightly controlled that on September 8, 2002, when another set of their planted lies appeared in the Times under Miller’s name, Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press to tout the article. “There’s a story in The New York Times this morning,” Cheney said, wearing his somber face. “And I want to attribute the Times.” Say “Times” again, Dick.

For her part, Miller later looked back on her false reports and said this: “If your sources are wrong, you’re going to be wrong.” Actually, the last time I checked, journalists were supposed to assess the credibility of their sources.

Why did Miller align herself so closely with the administration? Also, how did someone with so little understanding of how journalism works rise to a top position at TheNew York Times? While you’re pondering those questions, allow me to mention that Miller is a graduate of Barnard College, an expensive, private women’s institution in Manhattan, affiliated with Columbia University. She also obtained a master’s degree from Princeton.

After Miller’s reporting was exposed as a sick joke, NYT management initially defended her. But criticism of Miller grew so widespread that she ultimately resigned and took a job on Fox News Channel. Sources at the Times stated that Miller had been specially protected by the newspaper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who inherited that post from his father. Doug McGill, a former reporter at the Times, said in 2005, “Arthur’s social closeness to Judy is making it hard for him to see things clearly.” I like that word choice. “Social closeness” sums up not only the politics of the NYT but the larger problem of corporate media’s cozy relationship with the Bushites.

Let’s consider the case of another liberal in the front rank of the media’s war lobby. Bill Keller is a longtime writer and editor at The New York Times. In February 2003, Keller wrote a piece titled “The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club,” in which he discussed how prominent liberals were giving Bush political cover during the march to war. “The president will take us to war with support—often, I admit, equivocal and patronizing in tone—from quite a few members of the East Coast liberal media cabal.” (It figures: an NYT writer finally apologizes for the patronizing attitudes of East Coast liberals, and the recipient of the apology is George W. Bush.)

All you need to know about Keller’s reasoning in the column is illustrated by this passage:

“We are hard pressed to see an alternative [to war] that is not built on wishful thinking. Thanks to all these grudging [liberal] allies, Mr. Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the coming war is a far cry from the rash, unilateral adventure some of his advisers would have settled for.”

Keller condemned wishful thinking and then allowed himself to fancy that liberal support for Bush’s war prevented it from being a “rash, unilateral adventure.” It seems that, in Keller’s mind, he and his colleagues formed a sort of magic ankle-bracelet clinging to George W. Bush, radiating an aura of benevolence and consensus.

Such narcissism and illogic are hardly surprising, but they don’t get to the root of Keller’s war-mongering. Again, the writer’s class background may offer an explanation. Unlike many other top liberals in Bush’s war chorus, Keller is not an Ivy Leaguer. But he is a member of the You’d-Better-Believe-I’m-One-of-the-Elite Club: his father was chief executive officer of Chevron.

Here are some key events and dates to consider when weighing Keller’s contributions to the war debate. On the day Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, the benchmark price of a barrel of oil stood at $30.01. Five years later, the price was $103.25. In 2003, Chevron reported an annual profit of $7.23 billion. In 2007, the company’s annual profit was $18.68 billion. And here are two other facts that might warrant being placed next to each other. In January 2003, executives from major oil companies, including Chevron, met with Dick Cheney to discuss what to do with Iraq’s oil. (Chevron later turned out to be a major winner in the race to acquire new Iraqi oil contracts.) The following month, Keller’s “I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk” column came out.

In July 2003, Keller rose to the rank of executive editor of the Times, a position he held until 2011. With gas prices skyrocketing, Keller published news articles blaming that development on “speculators,” rather than, say, a relentless effort by the Bushites and oil executives to craft policies that increased Big Oil’s profits. Having provided such journalistic service to his country (or should that be “company”?), Keller now advocates bombing Syria and cutting Social Security. There is no word yet on whether he is still surprising himself.

Looking back to the eve of the Iraq War, we see a group portrait of the social elite at its most incestuous. Some of that group held positions in government. Others were in the media. Still others sat on the boards of giant corporations. But those distinctions mattered little. Whatever sector of society they officially occupied, members of the elite closed ranks to ensure yet another round of profitable carnage.

[i] Some have criticized the Lancet report, citing other studies that arrived at lower death tolls. The Lancet’s approach includes actual surveys of Iraqi households, rather than just figures reported by newspapers and government entities. Many of those killed in Iraq died during breakdowns in civil order or during religious cleansing. It is ridiculous to expect that government or media organizations would possess remotely complete accounts of deaths under those circumstances.

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Thu, 05 Feb 2015 13:32:26 +0000bmcaleerhttps://driving.ca/%make%/auto-news/entertainment/the-anglo-indian-a-jaguar-on-the-trail-of-author-rudyard-kipling/HARRISON, B.C. – This car seats five: myself, my young daughter, a likely lad named Mowgli, a wise old bear named Baloo, and a velvety, midnight-black panther called Bagheera. We are prowling alongside the steel rails which run deep into the ploughed lands of the Fraser Valley, listening to Baloo ladle out the Law of the Jungle.

This is the way Rudyard Kipling came, a hundred years ago. The author of Kim, Just So Stories, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and The Jungle Book visited our province several times, even buying parcels of land in North Vancouver and the Mount Pleasant area. On one of those journeys, as he waited for his ship to depart to the Orient, he came East on the rails to fish Harrison Lake and the rivers of the Fraser Valley.

North Vancouver on a foggy January morning is about as far from the jungles of India as you can get. The humidity is there, but the heat is absent, a rising damp that’d chill the bones of any Bombay-born writer.

The Jaguar XF has one paw in England and one in India.

But not in here, not with heated seats and steering wheel and automatic climate control. This ghostly white sedan is fitted with Jaguar’s all-wheel-drive system and every possible amenity. As we head out on our short journey, it’s a cozy inside as a wolf’s cave – roar all you want, Shere-Khan, you’re not getting in.

To trace the steps of a famous Anglo-Indian writer, there is no better vehicle. The Jaguar Land Rover group was purchased by Indian carmaker Tata motors seven years ago for the staggering sum of $2.3-billion. That gives this badge on this car a foot in both countries, and the XF is actually now built in India for the domestic market.

Once, India was the jewel of the British Empire, the Koh-i-noor in its crown. Canada, which Kipling called, “Our Lady of the Snows,” might be thought of as a vast, ermine-trimmed mantle.

These days, of course, all that’s been turned on its head, with India its own burgeoning world superpower and minting new maharajahs at an astounding rate. Once, the king of the Indian roads was something like the Hindustan Ambassador, a homely little car based on the Morris Oxford built from the late 1950s through until last year. These days, a Range Rover is a common sight.

The Jaguar XF is as cozy inside as a wolf’s cave.

As the XF’s supercharged 3.0L V6 purrs along the Lougheed Highway, paralleling the rails out to Mission, you have to reflect that Indian ownership has been the best possible thing to happen for Jaguar Land Rover. When Ford owned the company, clustered under the same Premier Auto Group umbrella as Volvo and Aston Martin, the story was that every dollar Volvo made, Jaguar lost. Now, profits are up, losses are down, and we have stuff like the F-Type, possibly the best-looking sportscar you can buy today.

It’s a healthier company than it’s been in decades, thanks to Tata’s ownership. Just as with other British traditions like cricket, India has taken the charm of an old world institution and infused it with a new vitality.

The sun comes out, and as we pass through Mission and into the fertile floodplains of the Fraser Valley, it’s hard to know what Kipling himself would make of all this. On one hand, his works are some of the best-loved children’s literature ever written. Kim is a masterful, loving portrait of turn of the century India. The man was awarded a Nobel prize for literature in 1907, the same year he addressed a packed audience at the Acland-Hood Hall at Pender and Hall.

Jaguar as a company is much healthier now that Tata has taken over.

But Kipling was also a man of his time and place, and that means many of his poems and speeches are unpalatable by modern standards. Many – not all, mind you – speak of Imperialism, of the raj, of innate British superiority.

Quite frankly, these are views he was not alone in having, as shown by shabby treatment of immigrants to our province in the early part of the century. Stories like that of the Komagata Maru, a steamship filled with Indian immigrants from the Punjab that was turned back from Vancouver’s port after a lengthy legal battle, are sadly all too common.

Here, Kipling got it wrong. British Imperialism broke against the trenches of the First Wold War, in the same places that Canada became a nation and 1.5 Million volunteer Indian soldiers fought with sacrifice and valour that would sow the seeds of eventual independence.

Indian ownership has been the best thing to ever happen to Jaguar as an automaker.

Perhaps this older Kipling, the one that saw his son disappear on the Western Front, never to be found, would have held different views than in his pugnacious youth. Perhaps he would have smiled to see the way the Indo-Canadian community has woven its threads into our country, maintaining a distinct identity while still making the whole stronger: construction, medicine, farming, technology, forestry.

“Such land is good for the energetic man.” Kipling said of British Columbia, “It is also not so bad for the loafer.”

Well, that’s me covered then, at least for the latter part. As we pull into the resort town of Harrison, there are a few hardy families taking a stroll around the lagoon, hands tucked in pockets against the wind coming cold off the lake.

The Jaguar XF is a princely place to spend time.

It makes a nice day trip to travel up here, whether for the Arts Festival in the summer or Sasquatch Days in the fall. You can fish for salmon or sturgeon, or simply cruise the lake and marvel at the backdrop of the surrounding mountains. A shame they haven’t held the famous sand castle competitions in a few years – perhaps they’ll be back some day.

As for the Jaguar, warm and snug with a two-year-old asleep in the rear seat, it’s been a fine beast with which to retrace Kipling’s footsteps. The new XE sedan and F-Pace crossover (still not sure about that name) mean that the company has growth potential still to come. Its India-based parentage has breathed new life into a brand that had risked becoming stagnant.

“Were I an intending immigrant,” Kipling wrote, a year after addressing the crowd in Vancouver, “I would risk a great deal of discomfort to get on the land in British Columbia.”

The annual conference of Norwegian union meeting in Trondheim, approved unanimously to propose a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize 2015 the International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Disaster Situations and Serious Epidemics, Henry Reeve.

Ambassador of Cuba, Maria Esther Fiffe, speaking at plenary highlighted daily basis feats performed by members of the contingent and as a selfless work; these professionals earn recognition, love and respect of millions of human beings in the planet.

Fiffe added that in the name of life and the Revolution, lives are saved and succor to millions of people worldwide affected by disasters and epidemics, as in the case of the 256 health professionals who are right now in West Africa in frontal fight against Ebola.

The Henry Reeve contingent named after the young American who died fighting for the independence of Cuba from Spanish colonialism.

In 1874, Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim, one of Britain’s greatest palaces. The Long Library, measuring over 55 metres from end to end, was once described as the longest room in England. As a boy, Churchill spent many holidays visiting his grandparents at Blenheim where he spent countless hours playing indoors and out with his younger brother Jack and their cousins. Perhaps his love of reading and writing started in the room shown above. Throughout his long life, Churchill composed hundreds of newspaper articles, magazine features, political speeches, public lectures, and full-length books, some of several volumes.

In the period following World War II, Churchill published The Dawn of Liberation (1945), Victory (1946), War Speeches (1940-45, 1946), Secret Session Speeches (1946), The Second World War, 6 volumes (1948-53), The Sinews of Peace (1948), Painting as a Pastime (1948), Europe Unite (1950), In the Balance (1951), The War Speeches, 3 volumes (1951-52), and Stemming the Tide: Speeches (1953.) That same year, on December 10th 1953, Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” Due to ill health, Churchill was unable to attend the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, and his speech was read by Lady Churchill.

The image featured above is part of the limited edition collector’s portfolio created by Leslie Hossack to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill. She presents locations that chart Churchill’s personal and political life, from his birth at Blenheim Palace in 1874 until his death in London in 1965. THE CHURCHILL PHOTOGRAPHS are part of Hossack’s larger body of work that explores Nazi architecture in Berlin, Stalinist structures in Moscow, contested sites in Jerusalem, a Cold War bunker in Ottawa, NATO’s Headquarter Camp in Kosovo, and buildings linked to the Japanese Canadian internment during World War II.

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Tue, 03 Feb 2015 21:59:27 +0000Lisa Hillhttps://anzlitlovers.com/2015/02/04/suspended-sentences-by-patrick-modiano-translated-by-mark-polizzotti/Suspended Sentences is a trio of linked novellas by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzetti and published by Yale University Press late in 2014. To the best of my knowledge it’s the first of Modiano’s work to be made available in English here in Australia; no doubt there will soon be more. I am very lucky to have been able to read this book so soon after it became available in Australia – my wonderful library got it in for me within a week of me asking for it to be purchased for their collection! Thank you, Kingston Library:)

One of my reading goals is to eventually read all the Nobel winners (the novelists, that is) and Modiano’s win last year was especially interesting to me because of the citation:

“for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation” (Source: Wikipedia)

This is perhaps because the Surrender of the French, the Occupation and the accompanying pro-Nazi Vichy regime has always fascinated me, because it seems incomprehensible. The French experience is quite different to other countries over-run by the Germans and a marked contrast to their previous military and political history. I am intrigued by how they reconcile this shameful aspect of their past, and how/if it shapes contemporary attitudes and literature.

All countries seem to have some shameful events in their histories, and there are differences in how we deal with it. S.A. Jones, in her novel Isabelle of the Moon and Stars, (see my review) raises the issue of how Germany remembers the shameful history of the Holocaust compared to the Czech Republic. Here in Australia even the acknowledgement of the dispossession of the indigenous people is contentious, whereas New Zealand dealt with that issue more than a century ago with the Treaty of Waitangi. In the US the shame of slavery dominates over the shame of indigenous dispossession, and in the UK, the shame of colonisation is still shaping attitudes long after the end of Empire, if Anglo-Indian and Anglo-African literature is anything to go by.

Modiano’s three novellas, shaped by shadowy memories of Occupation, exude a discomfited nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. Originally published separately, the stories form a cohesive whole through the narrator’s voice and the presence of some recurring characters. All three are permeated by a sense of loss. The novellas are unmistakeably Parisian, but they are located in a Paris that is gone, a city which, in ‘Flowers of Ruin’ seems now to offer more to tourists than to its residents. Watching a tour bus, the narrator observes that

The Jardins de Luxembourg was just one stop and they had all of Paris to visit. I wanted to follow them on that glorious morning, that harbinger of spring, and be just a simple tourist. No doubt I would have rediscovered a city I had lost, and through its avenues, the feeling I’d once had of being light and carefree. (p.212-3)

He remembers the days preceding his departure from Paris for Vienna, and ‘liberating’ a small dog from its cage in a kennel in Avenue d’Italie.

I sat down with him at a sidewalk café table. It was June. They hadn’t yet dug the foundations for the périphérique, which gives such a feeling of enclosure. Back then, the gates of Paris were all in vanishing perspectives; the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner. (p. 213)

(Though perhaps not quite the same, LOL, I can certainly relate to this feeling of entrapment by the périphérique). I have vivid memories of being stuck in it in peak hour when trying to return a hire car to the airport. We only just caught our flight in time despite having left the Loire Valley with hours to spare, which taught us a valuable lesson. Do not ever drive in Paris. Take the train!)

Modiano’s underlay of old Paris also holds memories of elusive people. The narrator thinks he sees the false Pacheco leading the tour, a man with eyes that so were so blue they were empty. Pacheco haunts his recollections because he is tied up in some way with a double suicide that took place decades ago in 1933; people and events swirl around in the fog of his memory but nothing is resolved.

This is also true of the other two stories. In ‘Afterimage’, the un-named narrator reflects on his attempts to engage with the photographer Jansen. They had met in 1964 when aged 19, and he was enthralled by Jansen’s photographs documenting a Parisian life that no longer existed, even then. He spends long hours cataloguing these carelessly stored photos because he thinks that Jansen, a student of Robert Capa, is a major artist and that the photos have historic value. But Jansen is indifferent to his own work, and abandons Paris for elsewhere, leaving the narrator with only a catalogue of photos that no longer exist and tantalising image-memories of people whose identity he does not and cannot ever know.

The sense of a mysterious unacknowledged past is even stronger in ‘Suspended Sentences’. In this story the narrator remembers his childhood during the Occupation. It has, according to the brief introduction by Polizzotti, biographical correspondences with Modiano’s own life, for both narrator and author were brought up in the absence of parents. In the novella, the narrator tries to make sense of strange events but his personal history remains opaque because all traces of the ‘gang’ that took care of him seems to have vanished. Were they crooks, or were they collaborators? He does not, and cannot ever know.

For many years Australians hid any trace of ‘the convict stain’ in their family history, and it seems that in France, as in Germany, there are also ominous silences and dead or misleading trails. I’ll be interested to read more of Modiano’s work, but next time, I want to read a full length novel.

Update 5/2/15 (thanks to Kim for these reminders) Stu at Winston’s Dad was among the first to review Modiano’s work in English – he read it before the Nobel announcement – and you can read his review of the novel The Search Warrant: Dora Bruderon his blog. (Needless to say this one is now on order for me from Fishpond, now that it’s available in Australia. Review in due course.)

A ghost is always the result of botched work; a ghost means an unsuccessful resurrection, a shadow of an image that has perhaps once been alive, a kind of abortion in the universe (125).

There are few texts in the world that allow me to stand back from the writing in total awe, turn to the author, and if he were not already dead, which is usually the case, I’d begin to scream, “Get out of my dreams; get into my car.”

Icelandic novelist and Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness has always been the one riding in the passenger seat, basically since Day 1, beginning with my reading of his absolutely gorgeous and incredibly consuming novel, Independent People (Sjálfstætt fólk, 1934)… consuming in a Post-Colonial way, of course (the only path to true love, let the Congregation say ‘Amen’.) Since then, I’ve been slowly moving through his lesser known novels, which have so far included Iceland’s Bell (Íslandsklukkan, 1943-46), a novel that should only be used for pure description of post-colonial theory in Western culture, The Fish Can Sing (Brekkukotsannáll, 1957), a dreadfully confusing book about a young man who can sing with the likes of Pavarotti but continues to starve with his shark eating ancestors, and now, Under the Glacier (Kristnihald undir Jökli, 1968)one of the most beautiful and most bizarre combinations of Judeo-Christian theology, existentialism, string theory, and aliens one could hope to find.

If you are like me and have a tendency to geek at biblical allegories or the intertwining of Abrahamic religions, Norse mythology, and aliens for the sake of creating an interesting plot, I urge you to read Under the Glacier as soon as you possibly can. Not only is Under the Glacier hilarious and witty beyond all reason, it is by far one of the most theologically ambitious novels I’ve come across.

The plot centers on the sudden disbursement of Embi, short for the Emissary to the Bishop of Iceland, to a small rural village called Glacier where the Christianity is in shambles. Embi is sent to investigate for the Bishop. The Bishop is concerned that the Church is boarded up, the dead aren’t being buried, Christmas or Easter Mass hasn’t been said in years, communion is never offered, but most importantly, why the absentee pastor, Pastor Jon Primus, hasn’t divorced his wife, a mysterious woman only know as Ua (because when men look at her, they’re so entranced they can only say, “Ooh, ahh”) who is rumored never to have bathed, eaten or slept in her existence and has been missing in Glacier for 45 years. When Embi arrives, he is forced to attempt to make sense of a nonsensical situation that not only involves itself in the ancient lore of the Icelandic Sagas but in galaxies far, far away.

Some fabulous Icelandic saga scenery.

The style of writing in Under the Glacier is perhaps the most drastic change from Laxness’ other works. This text is known as his visionary text, one that so elegantly and humorously combines Laxness’ adoration for the cultural influences of the Sagas themselves and the philosophy that binds us to the very core of why such lore exists. The novel is written in a play format, lines given to each character when it is their turn to speak, but there is often random switching between 1st and 3rd narration, especially for Embi, and it can become quite confusing if one is not following closely.

Under the Glacier also engages all the typical Laxness features that fans have come to expect in his novels, particularly with the the bizarre culmination of characters who you’d think should never actually be in the same room together. Embi is one of my favorites because you couldn’t help but feel bad for the little guy who desperately attempts to make sense of what can never make sense. Pastor Jon, even in all of his brutal honesty and questionable character, is pretty fabulous too, certainly a pastor I’d consider keeping around.

Embi: This calf met the undersigned on arrival last last.Pastor Jon: Didn’t you think he looks rather philosophical? Hnallpora thinks he’ll die. I think he’ll live. Spring is on the side of calves.Embi: In a way, a good representative.Pastor Jon: Certainly closer to the Creation of the world than the parish pastor.Embi: I don’t doubt that a calf fulfills his role in the Creation of the world even if he’s dying of starvation. The parish pastor, on the other hand, has the role of preaching to farmers. Why does he not fulfill that role?Pastor Jon: Farmers have cattle and kinsfolk.Embi: Cattle die, kinsfolk die.Pastor Jon: It doesn’t matter.Embi: We ourselves must also die.Pastor Jon: Allah is Allah.Embi: No revelation?Pastor Jon: The lilies of the field.Embi: Yes…Isn’t it ideal to preach about [lilies]–at Christmas, for instance?Pastor Jon: Oh no, better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.Embi: Are you sure the flowers are silent? If a sensitive enough microphone were placed beside them?Pastor Jon: You are welcome to take the pulpit, young man. We’ll have the nails out of the church door in a trice. -60-61

As in most Laxness novels, there is also an underlying commentary on the micro v. the macrocosm, particular with Iceland v. the world. This can be seen strongly in the way Christianity is conducted in Glacier as opposed to how it is supposed to be conducted. Religion and faith are literally thrown to the wind yet somehow still balanced in the everyday lives of Glacier’s inhabitants. Glacier and Laxness’ writing is also the place where the supernatural exist, the meeting place of our world with the Other, particularly through the use of mysterious, supernatural, gorgeous women like Ua.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, Glacier becomes the single place within all the galaxies and the human mind where the characters come into contact with the Real. The characters come into contact with what Lois Tyson explains as, “the uninterpretable dimension of existence…the existence without the filters and buffers of our signifying or meaning-making systems” (32). Embi, once he learns what is actually occurring in Glacier and the Christianity within it, comes into contact with the Real and the breaking of the Sublime, that which his mind has no meaning for.

There’s something incredibly haunting when it comes to Icelandic literature, probably because it was commonly thought in the Middle Ages that Hell was located in Iceland, that ghosts and monsters were created in this corner of Europe, but in this haunting, there is a beauty of the people who have used their strength and their humor to survive. But if anything, at least the writing of their Nobel laureate will make you swoon.

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

Estonian author Kaur Kender’s Petty God (Kirsi Ansper, 2010)

Under the Glacier: http://www.amazon.com/Under-Glacier-Halldor-Laxness/dp/1400034418

Tam Mutu (Yurii Zhivago), who stars as Stone in The Donmar Warhouse’s production of City Of Angels this winter, was recently seen as Javert in LES MISERABLES (Queen’s Theatre), and has theater credits that include Love Never Dies (Adelphi Theatre), Orange Peel (Royal Court), Royal Hunt of the Sun and Love’s Labour’s Lost (National Theatre), East (Leicester Haymarket), Romeo and Juliet and King Lear (RSC), As You Like It (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre), Dr. Faustus (Headlong Theatre Company) and Anatoly in Chess at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. Tam’s television credits include “Waking the Dead” and “Footballer’s Wives.”

Kelli Barrett

Kelli Barrett will star as Lara Guishar, Yurii’s paramour. Kelli’s Broadway credits include Wicked (Nessarose), The Royal Family (Gwen) and Baby It’s You! (Mary-Jane). Off-Broadway: Rock of Ages (original Sherrie), On Your Toes (Frankie) at Encores! Regional theater work includes productions at the York, Williamstown, New York Stage & Film, Old Globe, WBT, Cincy Playhouse, St. Louis Rep and Prince. Selected Film and TV credits include The Switch, Remember Me, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, “Blue Bloods”, “NCIS”, “L&O:SVU”, “Person of Interest”, “Gifted Man”, “Ugly Betty”, “The Good Wife” and recurring roles on “I Just Want My Pants Back” (Jane) and “Chicago Fire”(Renee Whaley). She and Tony nominee Jarrod Spector (currently starring in Beautiful) were recently wed in New York City

Paul Nolan will star as the political revolutionary, Pasha Antipov. Paul can currently be seen as Guy in Once on Broadway, having last been seen as Jesus in the 2012 revival of Jesus Christ Superstar. He originated that role at The Stratford Festival of Canada where he was also seen as Cousin Kevin in The Who’s Tommy, Tony in West Side Story, Orlando in As You Like It and Al Joad in The Grapes Of Wrath. Last year San Diego audiences saw him as Ben Nickel in the World Premiere of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots at the La Jolla Playhouse conceived and directed by Des McAnuff and Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. Also in the United States he was Radames in Aida at Kansas City Starlight. His film and TV credits include Will, “Something’s Coming,” Alex and Schumacher.

Lora Lee Gayer

Lora Lee Gayer was most recently seen on Broadway in Follies as Young Sally, opposite Bernadette Peters. Off-Broadway credits include Pipe Dream at Encores!, and These Seven Sicknesses at EPBB. Regional credits include Millie in Bull Durham (Alliance); Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Shakespeare Theater-Helen Hayes nomination); Young Sally in Follies (Kennedy Center, Ahmanson); Gloria Thorpe in Damn Yankees (Goodspeed); Carrie in Carousel (Virginia Opera); Barrington; MUNY; KC Starlight; and Bay Street. Graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Carnegie Mellon University.

Doctor Zhivago is an epic romance, revolving around the search for love during the final days of Czarist Russia, the First World War and the chaos of the Russian revolution. Raised as an aristocrat, Zhivago is a political idealist, physician and poet whose life is tossed by the tides of history as he is torn between a life with his devoted wife, Tonia Gromeko and the passionate and mysterious Lara Guishar. Zhivago however, is not alone in his yearnings for Lara, and must compete with both revolutionaries and aristocracy alike to win the heart of the woman he cannot live without. Doctor Zhivago celebrates the strength of love and art, in the face of political oppression and revolution.

Tickets for Doctor Zhivago are now on sale through Telecharge.com (212-239-6200) and are available for performances from Friday, March 27, 2015, through Thursday, March 31, 2016. Tickets range from $42.50 – $145.00 (include $2 Facilities Fee). For groups of 10 or more visit Telecharge.com/groups or to order by phone, call 800-432-7780. The playing schedule for Doctor Zhivago is as follows: Tuesday through Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 7:30pm with matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. Beginning April 27 the playing schedule will be: Tuesday and Thursday at 7pm, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm, with matinees Wednesday and Saturday at 2pm and Sunday at 3pm. Please note: There will be special performances Sunday, March 29 at 3pm, Sunday, April 19 at 3pm, Monday, April 20 at 8pm, and there will be no performances Saturday, March 28 at 2pm, Sunday March 29 at 2pm or 7:30pm, Sunday, April 19 at 2pm or 7:30pm, or Wednesday, April 22.

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Mon, 02 Feb 2015 11:26:09 +0000rumki moitrahttps://rumkimoitra.wordpress.com/2015/02/02/making-go-for-nobel-a-buzzword-in-indian-education/Given that I get most of my quota of daily news from the Net, I was greatly fascinated to discover earlier today that the President of the country is meeting the administrative heads of 39 Universities controlled by the federal government on February 4 & 5 to discuss how India may emerge as an education powerhouse.

The proposed subjects of discussion – as mentioned in the handout issued by the Government’s media managers – reads as follows: “action on previous recommendations; steps to create an eco-system for research and innovation with participation of industry and research institutions; capacity development of faculty, alumni participation, use of technology; deepening of engagement with community; creating international and national networks, adoption of choice based credit system etc.”

Quite a handful, as you can make out, for a proposed 2-day deliberation.

Be that as it may, as a parent whose son in a few years’ time would hopefully also be looking at University enrollment (unless, of course, he decides to skip formal university education to obtain his learning from the University of Life), I would be following the developments of this meeting with interest, and so I believe should others also given the amount of noise being made all around about the likely demographic dividend coming India’s way.

Given the importance that an ecosystem plays in any set-up – be it education, business, sport, music, the arts, you could just go on and on – to bring out the best in its practitioners and goad them on to set new benchmarks for attainment, I feel it would be wonderful if the President could inspire our education sector leaders to truly dream big. And what could be bigger than the desire to produce a Nobel laureate from each of their institutions?

Personally, nothing would make me happier than ‘Go for Nobel’ becoming a buzzword for the Indian education fraternity and silencing with its powerful resonance all the din around why particular persons are being chosen or removed from federally backed Universities which now seems to have become the most important topic of discussion in the Indian higher education space.

As a country, we would have truly arrived (or re-arrived depending on how one looks at it given that India gave the world the concept of zero) when our Universities could flaunt on their websites the number of Nobel laureates that they have produced or have as faculty members on the lines of a Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Cambridge, and the like.

Today, the 1st of February three years ago, is the day Wisława Szymborska, the great Polish poet died in Kraków. On this occasion, we are incredibly happy to be able to present you some of her poems on lyrikline, in her remembrance.

She really was a “Mozart of Poetry”, as many call her – and a modest one! In 1996, she won the Nobel Prize, donated all of the Nobel Prize money to social projects and held one of the shortest thank speeches ever in Stockholm. She actually mockingly divided her life in a “pre-” and a “post-Nobel-catastrophe”-period, as all the attention she got after 1996 was more of a burden to her, who never seeked public attention. It is such warm and precise irony that also characterizes many of her poems. Apart from this ironic perspective, it is not easy to describe Szymborska’s poetry as a whole, as it is so diverse. In fact, each poem is unique in its own way and it is precisely that which makes them all so irresistible.

From today on, you can listen to her yourselves on lyrikline, thanks to the kind permission of the Wisława Szymborska Foundation. This is also a great address if you want to get some additional information and videos, etc. With the help of our network partners we were also able to add translations (Croatian, Belarusian, Estonian, Swedish and German) and more will follow soon, for sure!

Enjoy!

This article was written by Carla Hegerl, lyrikline intern who helped preparing and editing Szymborska’s page on lyrikline.

Nobel Prize winning physicists have proven beyond doubt that the physical world is one large sea of energy that flashes into and out of being in milliseconds, over and over again. Nothing is solid.

This is the world ofQuantum Physics. They have proven that thoughts are what put together and hold together this ever-changing energy field into the ‘objects’ that we see.

So why do we see a person instead of a flashing cluster of energy?

Think of a movie reel.
A movie is a collection of about 24 frames a second. Each frame is separated by a gap. However, because of the speed at which one frame replaces another, our eyes get cheated into thinking that we see a continuous and moving picture.

Think of television.
A TV tube is simply a tube with heaps of electrons hitting the screen in a certain way, creating the illusion of form and motion.

This is what all objects are anyway. You have 5 physical senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste).
Each of these senses has a specific spectrum (for example, a dog hears a different range of sound than you do; a snake sees a different spectrum of light than you do; and so on).
In other words, your set of senses perceives the sea of energy from a certain limited standpoint and makes up an image from that.

It is not complete, nor is it accurate. It is just an interpretation.

All of our interpretations are solely based on the ‘internal map’ of reality that we have, and not the real truth. Our ‘map’ is a result of our personal life’s collective experiences.

Our thoughts are linked to this invisible energy and they determine what the energy forms. Your thoughts literally shift the universe on a particle-by-particle basis to create your physical life.
Look around you.
Everything you see in our physical world started as an idea, an idea that grew as it was shared and expressed, until it grew enough into a physical object through a number of steps. You literally become what you think about most. Your life becomes what you have imagined and believed in most.

The world is literally your mirror, enabling you to experience in the physical plane what you hold as your truth … until you change it.
Quantum physics shows us that the world is not the hard and unchangeable thing it may appear to be. Instead, it is a very fluid place continuously built up using our individual and collective thoughts.
What we think is true is really an illusion, almost like a magic trick.

Fortunately we have begun to uncover the illusion and most importantly, how to change it.
What is your body made of? Nine systems comprise the human body including Circulatory, Digestive, Endocrine, Muscular, Nervous, Reproductive, Respiratory, Skeletal, and Urinary.

What are those made up of?
Tissues and organs.

What are tissues and organs made of?
Cells.

What are cells made of?
Molecules.

What are molecules made of?
Atoms.

What are atoms made of?
Sub-atomic particles.

What are subatomic particles made of?
Energy!

You and I are pure energy-light in its most beautiful and intelligent configuration. Energy that is constantly changing beneath the surface and you control it all with your powerful mind.

You are one big stellar and powerful Human Being.

If you could see yourself under a powerful electron microscope and conduct other experiments on yourself, you would see that you are made up of a cluster of ever-changing energy in the form of electrons, neutrons, photons and so on.

So is everything else around you. Quantum physics tells us that it is the act of observing an object that causes it to be there where and how we observe it.

An object does not exist independently of its observer! So, as you can see, your observation, your attention to something, and your intention, literally creates that thing. This is scientific and proven.

Your world is made of spirit, mind and body. Each of those three, spirit, mind and body, has a function that is unique to it and not shared with the other. What you see with your eyes and experience with your body is the physical world, which we shall call Body. Body is an effect, created by a cause.

This cause is Thought. Body cannot create. It can only experience and be experienced … that is its unique function.

Thought cannot experience … it can only make up, create and interpret. It needs a world of relativity (the physicalworld, Body) to experience itself.

Spirit is All That Is, that which gives Life to Thought and Body. Body has no power to create, although it gives the illusion of power to do so. This illusion is the cause of much frustration. Body is purely an effect and has no power to cause or create.

The key with all of this information is how do you learn to see the universe differently than you do now so that you can manifest everything you truly desire.

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Sat, 31 Jan 2015 21:46:22 +0000The Spartan Echohttps://nsuspartanecho.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/charles-townes-who-helped-invent-now-ubiquitous-laser-dies-2/https://samirchopra.com/2015/01/31/robert-mundell-on-why-the-market-is-feminine/
Sat, 31 Jan 2015 18:32:44 +0000Samir Choprahttps://samirchopra.com/2015/01/31/robert-mundell-on-why-the-market-is-feminine/Robert Mundell received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1999 for his work in “monetary dynamics and optimum currency areas.” (He is currently professor of economics at Columbia University.) For as long as I can remember, I’ve owned a copy of his little primer, Man and Economics (McGraw-Hill, 1968; another edition bears the subtitle The Science of Choice.) Somehow, I’ve never gotten around to reading it. In this regard, Mundell’s book is exactly like many other books on my shelves. But on Friday, I finally began to make my way through its pages, curious to see what it held within.

Man and Economics was released in 1968, so I expected some aspects of its discussions of choice, supply, demand, inflation, money, currency rates, recession and unemployment, the gold standard etc to be just a little dated. As I read on, I noticed that what really gave the book’s vintage away was its choice of illustrative examples.

To wit, men are earners and women are spenders. The man brings home money, the woman spends it. This division and classification is then used to illustrate problems of liquidity, budget balancing, and so on. For instance:

There is a certain unevenness in spending and earning patterns . The husband may be paid for his services only once every week, fortnight, or month. Typically, the husband will deposit his salary in the bank every month, while the wife will go about the business of shopping every day or perhaps once a week. In this case, the cash balance will be high at the beginning of the month and gradually fall toward zero…toward the end of the month. Discipline is required at the beginning of the month, since it would be most unwise for the wife to spend a whole month’s income on rent, groceries, and other needs in the first two weeks. If this discipline is not present the family will suffer from a liquidity crisis toward the end of the month. Experience (or intrafamily strife) will teach the wife the expenditure pattern over time that is feasible with a given income, or the husband the income that is needed to maintain a certain expenditure.

But that’s not all.

Consider for instance, Mundell’s description of the language used to describe currency markets:

The language used by foreign-exchange dealers and operators responsible for supervising a market in which the government has a great stake may strike the reader as unusual. One speaks of the “feel of the market,” its “depth, breadth, and resiliency,” “strategy of penetration,” “getting in and out,” “slackness,” “looseness,” and the market “drying up.” It is the language of market intervention, but it all sounds like a scenario for a grand seduction. Indeed, one distinguished dealer from a very important central bank likens intervention to an exercise in applied psychology and manipulation of a market to the management of a woman. When it is troubled, it must be caressed; when it is quiet, it should be left alone; and when it gets hysterical, it has to be slapped. In that sense, the market is feminine.

Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga, died on this date in 1933. In 1967, the BBC adapted The Forsyte Saga into a popular 26- part serial. The success of the series led to the development of Masterpiece Theatre.
Watch a clip from the first episode here:

Thanks to Mara for this book recommendation, which won a Nobel prize. I did not appreciate the main character, David but was an interesting book set in Africa after the apartheid. It contrasted goodness with the evil along with themes of dominance, acceptance and forgiveness.

David was a divorced teacher who was very set in his ways. He had weekly trips to a prostitute that he enjoyed until he saw her out with her sons and he saw her differently. He became interested in one of his young students and took advantage of her sexually. A complaint was made and unbelievably, he was given an opportunity to save his job. He was set in his ways, refused to comply with his admission of guilt and counselling that could have salvaged his job and was fired.

The next part of the story saw him visit his daughter, Lucy, on her farm in the African countryside. Her partner had left her and she was alone. He stayed with her, helping with the market and volunteering with a neighbor who cared for sick and unwanted animals. Although he initially felt distain for the woman, he slept with her and ended up gently helping with the difficult task of euthanasia and respectfully taking the dog’s bodies to the crematorium.

While staying with his daughter, the farm was attacked. David was physically abused and briefly set aflame. He was locked in the bathroom while his daughter was raped. David could not understand her reaction – she did not tell the entire story to the police and did not want to talk about it. David wanted justice. He had failed as a father, not being able to protect her and then not being able to convince her to seek justice.

In the end, David has returned to find Lucy pregnant. He is frustrated by her living arrangements and the “protection” she has agreed to on the farm but has accept her choices. The final scene has him helping at the animal rescue. He has a dog that he has enjoyed and is taking him to be euthanized. He has the power to spare him for another week but instead carries him gently to the table.

I can’t say that I loved this book but it really did make me think. Parts of it reminded me a little bit of Lolita as David’s actions were repulsive and selfish. I did not like the character David – he was weak, selfish and although he could not take responsibility for his actions. Even given the chance to do something noble – save the dog, he was resigned to him being put to sleep and did not save him.

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Fri, 30 Jan 2015 06:22:03 +0000jackcollier7https://jackcollier7.com/2015/01/30/churchill/https://photonicpat.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/charles-hard-townes-1915-2015/
Thu, 29 Jan 2015 23:24:47 +0000photonicpathttps://photonicpat.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/charles-hard-townes-1915-2015/Yesterday I awoke to the news that Charles Hard Townes, a 1964 Nobel laureate for fundamental work on maser and laser physics, had died on Tuesday, January 27. In six months and a day, he would have turned 100 years old, but you can still think of this as his centennial year, in my opinion.

During my years working at OSA, I met six Nobel Prize winners; five are still with us. But Dr. Townes always looked hale and hearty, even well into his 90s, and he always went to conferences with his beloved wife, Frances — I thought that was so sweet of them. He was always the gentleman and not the least bit overbearing. At the symposium on the exact 50th anniversary of the first laser, when Dr. Townes gave his talk on the history of laser physics, he took a red laser pointer out of his pocket and used it so matter-of-factly, without harping on the fact that it — and a huge amount of today’s optical technology — has its roots in the insight he once had on a humble park bench just a few blocks from the White House.

I was already planning to write an article about Dr. Townes for an upcoming issue of OPN, so his death adds a new poignancy. I have to get back to work now, so I’ll leave you with a few links to some of the obituaries that have come out.

We have all heard someone comment, “You know, I never thought that kid would grow up to be famous.”

Several of my relatives began saying that to me in the 1980s when they started to run across news reports about one of my childhood friends from the 1950s.

In 1951, when I was eight years old, my mother, my father, my younger sister and I took up temporary residence with my mother’s parents and their three sons at my grandparents’ new home in the Berkeley Hills. My father was a hospital corpsman in the Navy at the time. He was serving on a ship stationed in San Francisco Bay and was awaiting notification to proceed north to his new duty station at the Navy base in Bremerton, Washington, where all of us would be going when the word came.

View of San Francisco Bay from Berkeley Hills

The house in the Berkeley Hills where we were staying was only around a year old at the time. It was located on one of the highest promontories in the area, on a large lot that my grandfather had purchased simply by paying the delinquent property taxes. My grandfather was an armed teller for the Crocker Bank in San Francisco. He had gone into this line of work in 1945 after serving as a gunnery officer in the Second World War. He used his financial knowledge to find the vacant lot. His oldest son, a decorator at a department store in Oakland, designed the house. A licensed architect put in the final details and then worked with a local contractor to complete the construction. The style of the house was daring, like so much of the architecture in postwar California. It was single-story, very horizontal, with numerous large windows of plate glass, exterior walls that combined white stucco and panels of redwood, and an interior that seemed to create almost no barriers between the living spaces and the front and back yards. Most of the other houses in the neighborhood were nondescript structures built in the 1920s. My uncle’s design seemed almost intrusive by comparison, and in this sense a fitting metaphor for my family’s situation.

Typical homes in the Berkeley Hills

The house put all of us in touch with a class of people we might never have known if my grandparents had bought property elsewhere. Given the highly desirable views and the cost of property, Berkeley in its hilly areas was an upper middle class neighborhood — and in some areas a very rich neighborhood. My grandparents were only able to enter by buying at a bargain rate and doing much of the property improvement with their own hands.

And so they found themselves next to new types of acquaintances: corporate executives, attorneys, members of major San Francisco accounting firms, doctors and dentists, professors from the University of California, and retired admirals and generals. All were white. All had black maids and Japanese-American gardeners. Nearly all had college degrees. Into this environment, we came: My Scotch-Irish grandfather, who had left school at age 13 to become a Navy gunner, was a short, stocky, hard swearing, muscular man who had once been the wrestling champion of the Pacific Fleet (or so he said). My grandmother, from a Portuguese Catholic family in Hawaii, had been educated at a convent school for girls. She had an olive complexion, dark eyes and short, shiny black hair; she seemed almost Arabic in appearance. Her defining trait was a lighthearted, entrancing laugh that could cheer up an entire roomful of people. My oldest uncle, the department store decorator, never planned on college and never went; he was not only visually talented but also a gifted singer who, because he disliked show business people, turned down offers in New York City to join Fred Waring’s choir. The next oldest uncle loved to hunt and fish, drove a beer truck after leaving high school and then joined the Air Force during the Korean War, and was talented in mathematics. He went to college because his fiancee, a teacher, insisted. My youngest uncle was a talented gymnast who hated his studies in school but was handsome and an amazing dancer. He knew cars well enough to steal them and get in trouble with the law. Then, after graduating from high school, he married, entered the car business himself and eventually owned a dealership. And there was the eldest child, my mother, who eloped to Reno to marry my father but always remained close to her family.

Some of the neighbors didn’t like us. We were never invited to certain homes. Other neighbors were fascinated and liked the change from routine we provided. Next door, for example, there was an accountant who had grown up in a stuffy family. He dropped by often. He loved it the night my youngest uncle, by then a car salesman, arrived at one a.m. with three cars full of friends and hangers on from an Oakland nightclub, accompanied by a five-piece Cuban dance combo that played as they walked up the path in our front yard.

One of our upper middle class neighbors was the Alvarez family. Luis Alvarez, the father, was a famous scientist. He had pursued Physics at the University of Chicago during the years when Enrico Fermi was conducting the experiments that led to the world’s first controlled atomic chain reaction. In Chicago he married into a family as wealthy as his. In the 1930s he and his wife moved to Berkeley at the invitation of Ernest O. Lawrence. In the Second World War, Dr. and Mrs. Alvarez moved to Los Alamos and helped to make the Atomic Bomb. They had two children: a daughter, Jean, and a son, Walter. After the War, the family returned to Berkeley and moved into a house just down the street from the one my grandparents owned.

Water Alvarez, right, with his father Luis in 1961

We might never have come into contact with the Alvarez family, so great were the class barriers, if I had not become friends with Walter. I was 8 years old at the time. He was 12. One day, I think it was while playing army man with several of the neighborhood kids in a vacant lot near our house, I met Walter. He found me refreshing. He was brighter than the other kids and he could see that I was, too. He enjoyed jokes and pranks just as I did. In his case, the proclivity had been passed on from his father, who used puns and absurd mechanical toys to relieve the mental and emotional strain of his intellectually demanding profession. Walter especially appreciated my ability to tell funny stories, which came easily thanks to a great fondness for conversation and wisecracks on both sides of the family. A free-flowing, communal feeling trailed along with me from my working class relatives. It gave Walter a release from the propriety of his own home.

At Walter’s house, life was heavy with civilization. There were Middle Eastern carpets on the floor, serious paintings on the walls, bookshelves in every room, and models of New England sailing ships in large glass cases at the top of the stairs near the bedrooms. The living room was dark and had just one small window that did little to take advantage of the view from the hills. For dinner, in the formal dining room, Walter had to put on a clean white shirt. Before the meal, however, he was required to sit at the family’s grand piano and do his daily practice. The first time I heard him, I was entranced by the beauty of the sound. I had never heard classical music before and I asked Walter what “tune” he was playing. He explained that it was one of Chopin’s Polonaises.

When Walter came to my family’s house, there was as much culture as at his, but it was untutored. My uncle Buddy, home from work, might be singing in the shower. My grandfather Harry, in a Hawaian sport shirt, might be telling lies about his experiences at sea. My mother, Flo, might be asking Walter what he liked about school, surprising him with the intelligence and perceptiveness of her questions.

The largest contrast between the two homes was the light. Walter envied the way the view of the entire Bay Area seemed to come right through our living room window, just as I envied his pedigree and social position and his parents’ formal education.

Walter and I spent most of our time together roaming the neighborhood. We did the kinds of things two smart aleck boys would do. One day, for example, we got some soap powder and used it as imitation white paint to put a sign on the concrete of the street with the words “Caution, Apes Crossing.” Most cars stopped. In the front yard of a house down the hill, where a pretentious couple lived, we constructed a sign made from orange crate wood and nailed it to a post. The sign read, “A former burlesque queen lives here.”

We directed our most inspired impudence at the house where the crabbiest family lived. It happened to be right next door to my grandparents’ house, which was important because our prank involved heavy lifting. My two older uncles often gave parties for large groups of friends. There was lots of gin, whiskey, and beer. After the parties, the empty bottles and cans ended up in our backyard in cardboard boxes, where they remained until the family made the next drive to the city dump. One evening after dark, Walter and I carried all the liquor bottles to the front yard next door and spread them in the shrubbery and all over the lawn. Next morning, all day long and into evening, pedestrians stopped, and passing cars slowed, to register their amazement that any family could be so besotted. Walter and I had to clean up the yard and each lost an allowance. I sometimes wonder if, today, a prank such as ours might cause a homeowner to phone the police. Times were different back then.

The thing that Berkeley has always been best known for is its status as the home of the flagship campus of the University of California. That fact was hugely important in my life. I don’t recall when I learned the word “campus” or first saw one. My earliest exposure to all the elements of a campus — a zone, usually in a natural setting, where there were buildings and people devoted to advanced learning — occurred around that time at age 8 when I was living at my grandparents’ house. Walter asked me if I would like to “see where my dad works.” I said “sure, why not,” got permission from my parents, and rode with Walter and his father through a park-like area that was, I was told, “the Cal campus.” Then we made our way up a winding road, through a guard’s gates, to the Radiation Laboratory that sat on the top of the hill behind the rest of the university.

UC Berkeley campus, with Berkeley Hills in background and Radiation Laboratory at left

We toured several buildings. At the Cyclotron, I watched metal fly across the room, attracted by the powerful magnetism. In a long, low, shabby, wooden building nearby, Walter showed me a slender, metal structure that extended the length of the interior. It looked like a lumpy metal snake, or like an automobile crankcase. Walter’s father kicked it. “I built this,” he said matter of factly. I was unimpressed and wondered why Walter’s father wasn’t working on anything more exciting. Years later, I learned that I had been standing next to one of the components of the world’s first linear accelerator, and that the odd object was one of the inventions that earned Walter’s father a Nobel Prize.

The 27-inch cyclotron at UC Berkeley

After my family left the Berkeley Hills and moved to Bremerton, I lost touch with Walter and did not hear anything about him for many years afterwards. Then, in the early 1980s, when I was back on a visit to the Bay Area, one of my uncles handed me a local newspaper and said, “Say, didn’t you used to play with a kid named Walter Alvarez? Well, he’s in the headlines.”

From that first newspaper article, and others that followed in later months, I learned that, after high school in Berkeley, Walter had attended Carleton College in Minnesota, obtained his Ph.D. in Geology at Princeton, and eventually joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he and his father Luis had developed a revolutionary theory that, 66 million years ago, because of the impact of a giant asteroid or comet on planet earth, a mass extinction had eliminated 75% of all species, due to ejection of large amounts of rock debris into the atmosphere, cutting off most access to light, lowering temperatures, and fouling the atmosphere. The result was elimination of all non-avian dinosaurs, with only smaller mammals and birds surviving. Walter and his father had propounded their theory before the 1980s and attracted worldwide attention because of it. The theory appeared to be confirmed in the 1980s by discovery of the largest impact crater on the planet, in the subsurface of the Yucatan Peninsula, dating precisely from the time of the extinction. Then in 2010 an international panel of distinguished scientists upheld the Alvarez findings.

Walter (in beret) and friends in Italy at the meeting of the Big History Society he formed to relate geology to human history

I have not had any contact with Walter since the early 1950s. But from time to time I read about his many discoveries and honors, and I remember the pleasure of having him as a friend and I imagine myself drinking a toast to him, using whatever whiskey might have remained in the bottles we scattered on that neighbor’s lawn many years ago.

For a fascinating memoir about Walter and his family, get a copy of the book by Luis Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (1987).

Walter Alvarez at a campus-wide lecture convened in his honor at UC Berkeley

The 60-year-old activist has been fighting for the abolishment of child slavery, trafficking and labour for over thirty years. He will address the issue of child trafficking 3 February at the British Asian Trust Annual Dinner. The theme for this years dinner is “unlocking potential in South Asia”.

“We need to form and instil stronger legislations and all the countries and their global heads need to come together to make a commitment to abolish child trafficking and slavery. I am convinced that together we can make an impact,” Satyarthi said to asianage.com

Satyarthi’s organisation ‘Bachpan Bachao Andolan’ has saved over 82,000 children from child labour and slavery since the start-up in 1980. Their mission is to fight slavery, forced labour and bonded labour. Important break-throughs for the organisation has been the ratification of the 1986 Enactment of Child Labour Act by the Parliament of India and the 1999 ILO Convention 182 on the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. The last break-through was after the Global March Against Child Labour, which had its end point in Geneva.

Satyarthi’s oranisation, goodweave.org, guarantees child labour-free rugs. Through this organisation he has saved children working in the carpet industry.

But though Satyarthi has helped liberate thousands of children, the fight against child labour and slavery is far from over. There are still about 4.3 million children between the age of 5 and 15 living as child labourers in India alone. Although forced labour is illegal, children under the age of 14 are allowed to work.

The Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labour from December 2014, showed that around 168 million children around the world are living as child labourers. Even though it is around 45 million less children than in 2008, which showed 215 million children, the numbers are frightening. These children have lost their childhood.

Last Saturday, more than 200 children were rescued by the Hybaderabad police in the Bhavani Nagar area, in India according to the New Delhi-based television station NDTV. The children, some as young as five or six, where bought from their parents for around 20,000 rupies from the northern parts of India. More than 500 police men were involved in the raid and 10 people have been arrested. Among them was Yasin Pehelwan, who according to the police transported the children to Hyderabad after giving money to the parents. The children were making bangles and leather, whilst living in hazardous conditions. Some of them had untreated wounds.

Satyarthi and Gordon Brown wants to make governments accountable. They are calling for the Children’s Court, which is much the same as the European Court of Human Rights. Although numbers in child labour is dropping, some countries are going the wrong way. The child-labour unit in Bangladesh is no longer existent and in Bolivia there is a new law who encourages children from the age of 10 to work.

Child labour is not right.

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Thu, 29 Jan 2015 15:21:31 +0000Sarah Angletonhttps://sarah-angleton.com/2015/01/29/a-sock-full-of-mold-juice-how-poor-housekeeping-saves-lives/I have very clear, happy memories of many family vacations throughout my childhood, but there is one not so great memory that sticks out in my mind. It was the year my mother decided we needed to first deep-clean the house and then leave so it would stay that way.

I wasn’t a very neat kid. My room was always a disaster, with toys and books everywhere, and with who knows what growing on the slightly damp balled up socks in the corner of the closet. As the youngest during that pre-vacation cleaning spree, my job was to scrub window sills and to clean up my disaster of a bedroom. I’m not sure what year it was, or what trip we were headed out on, but I do know for certain that we came home to a clean space.

That wasn’t the case for Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming when he returned to his lab in September of 1928 after a two-week family vacation. He found the lab exactly as he’d left it, a jumbled mess of half-finished experiments and dirty glassware. It seems Fleming never consulted with my mother on the joys of returning home to a clean space.

Even in his postage stamp he is surrounded by precariously stacked petri dishes.

After his vacation, Fleming found himself sorting through petri dishes filled with growing staphylococcus that had been left in a pile in the corner of the room while he was gone. When he got to one that was overwhelmed by growth of an unidentified mold, he might have simply said “Ew” and thrown it into the sink, or at least the corner of the closet.

But fortunately, he didn’t. Instead, Fleming said, “That’s funny.” As he looked at the dish more closely he noticed that where the mold thrived, the bacteria didn’t. He set to work identifying the funky growth as belonging to the penicillium family, and hypothesized that the “mould juice” it produced had an antibacterial effect.

In 1929, he changed the name of his antibacterial substance from “mould juice” to the sciencier sounding “penicillin” and published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology. The article went largely unnoticed for several years as Fleming attempted to further his research, only to discover that without some help from a chemist or two, he couldn’t be sure that mould juice was worth the effort.

Fleming’s lab has been preserved at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, presumably exactly as he left it. You don’t even want to know what’s growing in there after sixty years. Or maybe you do. photo credit: nick.harrisonfli via photopincc

Help arrived shortly after Fleming had officially given up. Pathologist Howard Florey and Biochemist Ernst Chain read Fleming’s long-overlooked article and began experimenting with Penicillin in mice, finding that it cured them of their mousy bacterial infections. All they needed was a way to mass produce Fleming’s mould juice. They headed to America, dropped that pesky “u” and found that Illinois produce was particularly good for growing mold (a point of pride, I’ve no doubt, for my state of origin).

All three men were awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of what remains one of the greatest leaps forward in modern medicine, leading to the discovery and production of many more antibiotics, stopping infections and saving countless lives, all because Alexander Fleming didn’t bother to clean his room.

I admit that I have not shared this story with my children. You see, much to my mother’s surprise, I grew up to be a somewhat tidy housekeeper. And my sons definitely complain when I assign them the task of cleaning their disastrous bedrooms (and sometimes the window sills, because I have an aversion to the task).

My son once told me, “Cleaning your room is like winning the sock lottery!”

But when my oldest son, who has had a cold for over a week, woke up the other night, screaming with terrible ear pain, I was grateful for the slovenly habits of Dr. Fleming. The next day I took him to the doctor, who looked in his angry ears and prescribed him an antibiotic. He stayed home from school, taking it easy the rest of the day. As he started to feel better, I confess I considered making him clean his room. I didn’t, because you never know what might be growing on the slightly damp balled up socks in the corner of the closet.

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Thu, 29 Jan 2015 06:47:58 +0000iyengarrishihttps://time.com/3687197/charles-townes-inventor-laser-dies-99/Charles Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist credited with the invention of the laser and its predecessor — the maser — died in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday.

Townes’ health had been rapidly deteriorating and he died on the way to the hospital, according to the University of California Berkeley, where he had taught physics since 1967.

Townes, who was 99, jointly won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the field of lasers, sharing it with two Russian scientists.

Born in Greenville, S.C., in 1915, Townes studied at Duke University before completing his PhD at Caltech in 1939. A stint at Bell Labs was followed by a faculty position at Columbia University, where he taught before moving to MIT in 1961 and finally to Berkeley six years later.

“Charlie Townes had an enormous impact on physics and society in general,” said Steven Boggs, professor and chair of the UC Berkeley Department of Physics. “His overwhelming dedication to science and personal commitment to remaining active in research was inspirational to all of us.”